Mollie Hemingway, writing in the Wall Street Journal:
The reality is that the New Atheist campaign, by discouraging religion, won’t create a new group of intelligent, skeptical, enlightened beings. Far from it: It might actually encourage new levels of mass superstition. And that’s not a conclusion to take on faith — it’s what the empirical data tell us.
The reason, as David Friedman suggests, may be that although science has shed light on our physical world, it has not allowed humans to make sense of their lives or understand what the ‘purpose’ of life really is. For this, some people have continued to turn to religion; whereas others have rejected religion but have embraced substitutes such as, “Environmentalism, Liberal politics, Marxism (as in “liberation theology”), Objectivism, New Age superstitions”.
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Whatever. As long as we don’t believe magical horses that can travel at the speed of light and Jinn which can possess you. As long as we don’t pretend that a pathetic, contradictory and incoherent book provides irrevocable proof of a crazy schizophrenic having spoken to god, atheists will remain more rational than Muslims, even if a few of us do turn to dogmatic political ideologies and eastern superstitions.
Salaam alaikum,
The former NYT journalist Chris Hedges has written a great critique of New Atheists in his new book. He really pulled apart the irrationality of Hitchens, Harris and Dawkins.
Science is not the custody of the New Atheists, as they often point out to us. Hedges has rightly argued that Hitler’s gas chambers were the product of the linear behaviour of the Enlightenment. I even put this question to one of my subject tutors and he said that extreme Reason, which is flawed in its conception, can lead to fascism.
It’s a grave misconception to think atheism can be proven on rational or scientific grounds. Nobody can construct a lab test to prove that God doesn’t exist and so it’s laughable that the New Atheists strut around as though THEIR belief system is more scientific or rational than those of Muslims, Christians, Jews and other theists.
The fact is that the majority of people in this world believe in God. The majority of people in this world have always believed in God. The New Atheists are arguing from a minority position and rather than the majority of humanity justifying their belief in the design, the atheists should just be asked to justify and prove their disbelief in the divine because that is a strange and unusual idea indeed.
I’m pretty sure liberation theologians won’t take too kindly to having their beliefs characterized as a ’substitute’ for religion.
Nevertheless, on the whole, he seems to be correct. I group these atheists with the believers who refuse to read or consider anything outside of what is deemed to be part of their respective Canons. It’s reflective of a culture of not thinking. A culture of taking things for granted–whether it’s certain Protestants or Muslims who refuse to consider that the words in the NT or Qur’an might have been said in response to something, or scientists who think because something cannot be empirically validated (with the knowledge and tools we have so far, no less) that it is simply childish to believe it. The atheists are more Christian than they would like to think themselves to be, and the believers of the world are a lot more in tune to secular concerns than they would like to be. Everybody is hypocritical and wrong!
Pfffffffft. The most annoying thing about it all is that we atheists can never have the pleasure of saying “I told you so”…
What for? So you can continue being insufferable, even in death? Eternity in hell almost seems fitting.
If you disbelieve in God and it’s true, you will suffer a great deal as a result. If you believe in God and it turns out that there isn’t a God, then you have not lost anything by doing so. Therefore, regardless of any other argument, the rational person such foster a belief in God as an insurance policy of sorts.
Atheism is like playing chicken on a busy highway.
I don’t see that there’s any distinction between ’superstition’ and ‘religion’. All he’s saying is that humans deprived of one set of religions might turn to another set.
“Nobody can construct a lab test to prove that God doesn’t exist ”
No, but it’s the claim that something exists that need to be tested. Nobody can construct a lab test to prove that a god exists.
Ah yes, playing on the safe side. No, I figure an intelligence enormous enough to create or intelligently design the universe in which we live probably doesn’t care what I do with my sex organs and didn’t stir up a whole lot of trouble in one tiny corner of the planet just to sit back and watch assorted primitive tribes spend the next few millennia hating and killing each other over it/him/her. It seems unlikely that an irrational being could design a rational universe, so rather than man being created in God’s image, it was the other way around.
It’s annoying in some ways, as it means I don’t believe Dick Cheney and Karl Rove will burn in hell for eternity, nor will the Bali bombers or OSB or Stalin or Hitler or Mao… That’s disappointing but I can’t spend too much time dwelling on the negatives. Gotta get on with living this life.
So, the best argument in favour of religious belief is not whether it is true but the apparent nature of human psychology and its effects on human behaviour. It’s interesting that people think that religion gives a ‘purpose’ to their lives; even if there were such a ‘purpose’, what would be its’purpose’? Or the ‘purpose’ of that ‘purpose’? Like the question of’Who created god?’, it merely shifts the question to another level without giving an answer.
‘The majority of people in this world have always believed in God. ‘
Actually, the majority of people in this world have always believed in different gods to one another. It looks as if we are predisposed to believe, but not what we believe. Indeed, the fact that otherwise rational people believe in the nonexistence of god, rather than simply not believing, is evidence that a tendency to believe is innate to humans. The existence of every human belief is evidence against the truth of every other human belief.
‘What for? So you can continue being insufferable, even in death? Eternity in hell almost seems fitting.’
Almost? Come on now, you are supposed to believe that an eternity of literally insufferable torture for rejecting your superstitions is perfectly fitting. Don’t you believe that if you don’t believe that you will fittingly suffer those tortures yourself, Eudamonion?
‘I don’t see that there’s any distinction between ’superstition’ and ‘religion’. All he’s saying is that humans deprived of one set of religions might turn to another set.’
No. All he’s saying is that humans deprived of one set of superstitions might turn to another set.
Salaams,
I shudder to think of a world without the knowledge of God. Almighty Allah in his wisdom and mercy allowed man to know Him. If it was all just a natural cycle based on instinct, man would be extinct long ago. Thank God or keep silent.
To the atheists on here, can you prove using reason that God doesn’t or cannot exist?
“If it was all just a natural cycle based on instinct, man would be extinct long ago.”
How so?
“can you prove using reason that God doesn’t or cannot exist?”
Of course not, no more than you can prove the presence, but it shouldn’t be up to us to prove the absence of anything. In any case, I don’t care whether you believe in Allah or Yahweh or the Flying Spaghetti Monster or the Great Pumpkin unless your belief and your behaviour as a result of your belief begins to impact negatively on me in some way. People who believe in assorted gods have created some amazing art and architecture and music as a result, which I really appreciate, but they’ve also done quite a few things I’m less enthusiastic about.
can you prove using reason that Jupiter doesn’t or cannot exist? Zeus? Krishna? Thor? Huitzilopochtli? Hotwatrbotl?
Hotwartbotl is my fave.
Wishing an eternity in Hell on someone is downright unsporting Cinna, and if there is something I’m not, its unsporting.
“To the atheists on here, can you prove using reason that God doesn’t or cannot exist?”
Funny, I’m pretty sure that YOU couldn’t “prove” or even argue credibly that an omnipotent force called “Allah” – which still allows children to die from bone cancer up to this very day – told an illiterate merchant, via an arch-angel, that he was about to become the author of an as yet unpublished book!
Another preposterous fairy-tale, with no basis in fact whatsoever. Why don’t YOU show that this particular claim (or any other laughable screed from the same genocidal Abrahamic tradition) has some veracity to it, rather than lazily demanding that sceptics prove a negative?
“Almighty Allah in his wisdom and mercy allowed man to know Him.”
Yes, so “merciful” “he” is that he continues to torture young children to death at the hands of leukemia and other agonising afflictions. Or did this “Allah” figure recent abdicate the throne of “omnipotence”?
“If you believe in God and it turns out that there isn’t a God, then you have not lost anything by doing so. ”
Yes, I think you should all convert to Zoroastrianism immediately, or you will all die a horrible death! Sorry, I meant Judaism, or else you will burn in hell. Er, I meant to say, you must all worship Baal, otherwise…Oops, I mean Zeus…Pardon me, now I’m quite CERTAIN about this: if you don’t bow down to Molak, then it’s perpetual curtains for your soul. Ok?
“Wishing an eternity in Hell on someone is downright unsporting Cinna, and if there is something I’m not, its unsporting.”
It’s not merely unsporting. It’s deplorable, it’s wicked, and it’s deeply immoral to wish upon anyone the fate of being physically incinerated, on the basis of no crime except disbelieving the wishful-thinking fantasies of theists.
Not a matter of wishing it, surely, Eudaemonion, but accepting god’s verdict on those who reject the word when it is offered. As god makes the rules, captains a side and referees the game there is no need for him to be sporting.
The personality of the god you propose is, in that case, rather obnoxious.
No, they most certainly do wish it; in fact they take particular pleasure in the sadistic torture of non-believers that they say, on the basis of nothing that should be taken seriously, will await them at the end of their life. Where do you think the quote “Allah is Exalted, Wise” comes from? Right after describing, in gory detail, the excruciating death (or post-death) that is meted out to non-believers!
The greatest work of man’s an honest god.
Still waiting.
Humans have always have had some kind of faith. We see connections that are not readily apparent. In past time we explained those connections via something called Paganism. There is a rich and well documented history of shamanic practice in Aboriginal cultures. We are most likely hard-wired for some kind of faith. What does not follow is that we must follow any specific organized faith or Religion.
Minds much more brilliant than ours have argued about the existence of god(s) from the very beginning. There are plenty of arguments for the deistic theory. There are also many good arguments against. For Monotheists the arguments get a little tricky because not only do you have to prove that a deity exists but it is of a singular nature. Even more difficult to prove is that one’s concept of a singular godhead is the one and only correct concept.
The more specific the concept, the easier it is to poke holes into it. Do you really believe that a obscure merchant from the Arabian Peninsula jumped onto a magical winged horse and then traveled on that same horse to Jerusalem? Do you really believe in demons and Jinns? More to the point is it virgins or white raisins you get for dieing for the religion?
This is not dismiss all wonder from the world, to reject that life in its many forms is sacred. It is not to reject the need for contemplation and reflection. It is not to sink pel-mel into materialism and worldliness. It is to say as we are human none of us really has it nailed down. Science is not religion and the scientific method can not give meaning to our lives.
Science merely tries to explain observable phenomenon and make predictions of how they play out. It is way of explaining the physical world, it has next to nothing to say about moral choice and how people should behave. The Mau-Mauing of “Science” by Atheists is an insult to the field. There now way “Science” can either prove or disprove any deity. Certain deities have gotten the short shrift, The Norse God of Thunder is bit down on his luck since we have weather satellites and electron-hole theory to explain how lighting forms. But the math(s) behind chaos theory that support the modern understanding of weather are just as impenetrable as any writing by St. Agustin on the nature of the Trinity. Besides it is one thing to explain a thunderstorm via electron theory and cumulonimbus clouds and it quite another thing to bear witness to a particularly dramatic storms. The color of the world around you, the winds, the rains the smell all defy a mathematical formula. They speak to a different part of our minds. To scoff at that artistic and spiritual side of our being is to deny our humanity.
(Side bar, Hitler had next to nothing to do with “science” or “rationalism” or even modernity. His was a new type of barbarism. It was anti-intellectual, anti-rational, and inhumane. To pin the excesses of Hitler on Atheism or Agnosticism is to pin the excesses of Al Queda on Islam, it is pure sophistry. )
Belief in God(s) is an act of faith. Faith means you believe in something that can NOT be proved by observation. In Arabia people believed that a nice man living in what we call the 7th Century of the Common Era had a special connection with an unobservable preternatural power. All of the signs of that connection were secondary at best. Come on all Allah had to do is give a undebatable sign. Nothing really flashy just a very public confirmation that we could verify in present day. Sadly we don’t even have the bones of that winged horse to prove the account given in a very biased publication. There is nothing in the story of Muhammad that can not be explained by luck, intelligence and Charisma. This is not to question his deep and abiding faith and the men and women who have followed his footsteps in the centuries since; it is to say this is a matter that beyond the ability of logic or reason to totally explain. In the end you either believe in Allah or you do not. In the end it is a personal choice, something you either accept, reject or remain neutral on.
All faith is personal, what we believe or don’t believe is our own idiosyncratic way of dealing with a huge indifferent universe. If we believe in the account given in Genesis all we really are is mud with an attitude. If you believe Darwin we are just overly clever apes that just might be racing to auto-extinction. Either way a little humility is in order. Believe in what you believe but always accept the possibility that you could be terribly wrong.
Some religions are more compatible with science than others. Xianity and Buddism are probably the best fit with science. Obviously the most anti-science is [Sunni] Islam (Shia and especially Sufi are much more hospitable).
Oracle,
You have the IQ of a common house fly. Buzz off.
“Some religions are more compatible with science than others. Xianity and Buddism are probably the best fit with science. Obviously the most anti-science is [Sunni] Islam (Shia and especially Sufi are much more hospitable).”
This is all speculation. The fact that some people believe a genocidal, bipolar deity called Yahweh suddenly changed his stripes and discovered human compassion around, oh, 30AD, while carrying out a monstrous human sacrifice in order to prove some ethical point (!), is no more conducive to the scientific method than the equally preposterous fantasy which holds that the same murderous deity took a crash course in Arabic as a Second Language, and chose an illiterate merchant to be the author of his bloodcurdling sequel (this time, we are told, it is to be the very last of the two, or three, part series) – which is monomaniacal in its obsession with burning and torturing anyone who doesn’t take its laughable claims seriously.
Neither of these contemptible screeds has anything useful to say about science (and a glib one-liner from a non-reader about the virtues of reading doesn’t count, I’m afraid), ethics, or indeed anything about the world at all beyond a very narrow set of reference points (desert-dwelling, goat-herding, wife-beating and massacring the tribe next door etc), many centuries ago, in a particularly backward and barbaric part of the world.
” Come on all Allah had to do is give a undebatable sign. Nothing really flashy just a very public confirmation that we could verify in present day. ”
Yes, it’s too bad “Allah”, “Yahweh”, or whatever he is calling himself now, didn’t think of finding himself a Chinese or Indian “prophet” – what a remarkable omission for an omniscient deity to somehow forget to translate his brilliant moral insights (via someone who can’t read!) directly so as to make them intelligible to the two of the largest and oldest continuing civilisations on earth.
Oracle,
Orthodox Christianity had some major problems with Science from about the 5th century of the Common Era right up to the 12th century and beyond. Or have you forgotten Galileo’s little tussle with the Pope?
In the 10th,11th,12th and 13th Centuries Islam was the leading light of science and other forms of inquiry. There is plenty of evidence that the flowering of the European Renaissance was fertilized by European contacts with then Muslim Spain.
At one time (and that is the awful rub, it is in the past) Islam was progressive, inquiring, dynamic, inventive and adaptable. It is only recently that parts of Islam have become dominated by grumpy retrograde men with long white beards.
Islam is struggling with modernity, that much is true. So too however is Orthodox Christianity and just about every other major faith in the world. Islam certainly does not have a monopoly on rigid fundamentalist ideologues. It is hard to say who is more dogmatic, “left behind” Christianists, Salafist extremist, or dogmatic Atheists. None of them have any humility or common sense.
Remember that Atheists can be as irrational, belligerent, cruel, despotic, and murderous as any religious warrior fighting for the one true faith. Remember Soviet Russia and remember the excesses of Maoist China. Lenin, Stalin, Mao and others were committed Atheists; that did not make them scientific, rational or enlightened. China, Russia and other lands are choked with the bones of innocents slaughtered by the Commissars of Marxist Atheism.
People really don’t need much of an excuse to wallow in ignorance, hatred and bigotry. Any ideology will do. Fear of the other is an easy emotion to tap into. Channeling that fear into a murderous rage is also far too simple. Islam has no monopoly on this, more to the point, no part of Islam is no more or less likely to go off the deep end than any other. Even more to the point, no religion or faith is more or less likely to descend in barbarity than the other. This is especially true if that faith believes it is “Defending” itself against an incursion. The most aggressive, murderous, and brutal of hegemons all acted out of “defensive” considerations. Given the right set of circumstances one could easily turn Quakers in to a band of murderous thugs.
“Islam is struggling with modernity, that much is true. So too however is Orthodox Christianity and just about every other major faith in the world.”
Why does one feel the need to be so cowardly in the presence of religion? The fact is that Islam is a hateful, barbaric load of nonsense – how could I conclude otherwise when a written text explicitly condemns ME in advance as vermin, scum, ignorant, fit only to be treated as chattel and incinerated for all eternity, for the single “crime” of failing to believe its absurd claims, despite that I never picked any fight nor asked for that kind of treatment? – that should be marginalised and excluded as a respectable belief system. The Golden Rule, which is of course completely foreign to Arabian dual-moralists, demands nothing less than that those who gratuitously treat me with contempt receive an equal or greater serve in kind.
Religious fanatics (and this is hardly restricted to Muslims, but they are of course major offenders at this point in time) are not simply “grappling” or “struggling” with modernity. They are attempting to destroy modernity root and branch. Muslims openly advocate the censorship or even execution of anyone who offends their pathetic sensibilities. Hindus kill Christians for trying to convert their lower-caste untermenschen, who are presumably sick of being the victims of an ancient apartheid racket. Catholic priests molest young children, and generally try to inhibit the advance of science. Retarded Dispensationalists continue to pollute American politics and reduce public policy to a standing joke with their general idiocy. And Jewish rabbis openly call for more “breathing space” in Israel’s Near Abroad. All of this evil is part and parcel of public religion – it is not the “extreme” “radical” fringe, but the moderate mainstream.
Could you perhaps supply the text where it calls you Wayne, generally or specifically, vermin, scum, ignorant, fit only to be treated as chattel or any other spurious assertion of yours?
James
Islam led to the Renaissance, eh? Now, that’s a beauty! Pity they didn’t take it up themselves.
The science praticed in the muslim world largely occured IN SPITE of Islam. It was done largely by christians and Jews, and when it was done by Muslims they were nearly all Persian Shia. The contribution of Sunni Arabs to science has been virtually zero, and is getting worse.
Indeed Oracle. You’re unsubstantiated, spurious assertions carry more weight than the scholarly inquiry.
James,
It is incorrect to say that ISLAM was the leading light of science, just as it would be incorrect to say that pagan Greek religions led the light of Greek philosophy.
Many of the scientists who lived in the Islamic golden age were branded Kuffar. Ibn Sina – Arguably the Middle East’s greatest scientist – comes to mind as does Al-Razi who was an ardent critic of Islam. That is not to say there were no religious scientists, but merely that it is a false cause fallacy to attribute the advances of the early first millennium to Islam.
” it is a false cause fallacy to attribute the advances of the early first millennium to Islam.”
I don’t think it is a false cause fallacy to attribute the abandonment of science and the loss of interest in science in the pre-islamic period in that millennium to christianity though, and the lack of interest of the Romans in theory compared with the Greeks before that.
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